The Tree of Heaven. Sinclair May

that queer look on his father's face he smiled at it. He had to make the smile himself, for it refused to come of its own accord. He made it carefully, so that it shouldn't hurt him. But he made it so well that it hurt Frances and Anthony.

      "I never saw a child bear pain as Nicky does," Frances said in her pride.

      "If he can bear it, I can't," said Anthony. And he stalked into his dressing-room and shut the door on himself.

      "Daddy minds more than you do," said Frances.

      At that Nicky sat up. His eyes glittered and his cheeks burned with the fever of his earache.

      "I don't mind," he said. "Really and truly I don't mind. I don't care if my ear does ache.

      "It's my eyes is crying, not me."

      At nine o'clock, when they were all sitting down to dinner, Nicky sent for his father and mother. Something had happened.

      Crackers, he said, had been going off in his ears, and they hurt most awfully. And when it had done cracking his earache had gone away. And Dorothy had brought him a trumpet from Rosalind's party and Michael a tin train. And Michael had given him the train and he wouldn't take the trumpet instead. Oughtn't Michael to have had the trumpet?

      And when they left him, tucked up in his cot in the night nursery, he called them back again.

      "It was a jolly sell for me, wasn't it?" said Nicky. And he laughed.

IV

       Table of Contents

      It seemed that Nicky would always be like that. Whatever happened, and something was generally happening to him, he didn't care. When he scaled the plaster flower-pot on the terrace, and it gave way under his assault and threw him down the steps on to the gravel walk, he picked himself up, displaying a forehead that was a red abrasion filled in with yellow gravel and the grey dust of the smashed flower-pot, and said "I don't care. I liked it," before anybody had time to pity him. When Mary-Nanna stepped on his train and broke the tender, he said "It's all right. I don't care. I shall make another." It was no use Grannie saying, "Don't care came to a bad end"; Nicky made it evident that a bad end would be life's last challenge not to care. No accident, however unforeseen, would ever take him at a disadvantage.

      Two years passed and he was just the same.

      Frances and Anthony agreed behind his back that Nicky was adorable.

      But his peculiar attitude to misfortune became embarrassing when you had to punish him. Nicky could break the back of any punishment by first admitting that it was a good idea and then thinking of a better one when it was too late. It was a good idea not letting him have any cake for tea after he had tested the resilience of the new tyres on his father's bicycle with a penknife; but, Nicky said, it would have been more to the purpose if they had taken his steam-engine from him for a week.

      "You didn't think of that, did you, Mummy? I thought of it," said Nicky.

      Once he ran away over the West Heath, and got into the Leg of Mutton Pond, and would have been drowned if a total stranger hadn't gone in after him and pulled him out. That time Nicky was sent to bed at four o'clock in the afternoon. At seven, when his mother came to tuck him up and say Good-night, she found him sitting up, smiling and ready.

      "Mummy," he said, "I think I ought to tell you. It isn't a bit of good sending me to bed."

      "I should have thought it was, myself," said Frances. She almost suspected Nicky of insincerity.

      "So it would have been," he assented, "if I didn't 'vent things. You see, I just lie still 'venting things all the time. I've 'vented three things since tea: a thing to make Daddy's bikesickle stand still with Daddy on it; a thing to squeeze corks out of bottles; and a thing to make my steam-engine go faster. That isn't a punishment, is it, Mummy?"

      They said that Nicky would grow out of it. But two more years passed and Nicky was still the same.

      And yet he was not the same. And Dorothy, and Michael and John were not the same.

      For the awful thing about your children was that they were always dying. Yes, dying. The baby Nicky was dead. The child Dorothy was dead and in her place was a strange big girl. The child Michael was dead and in his place was a strange big boy. And Frances mourned over the passing of each age. You could no more bring back that unique loveliness of two years old, of five years old, of seven, than you could bring back the dead. Even John-John was not a baby any more; he spoke another language and had other feelings; he had no particular affection for his mother's knee. Frances knew that all this dying was to give place to a more wonderful and a stronger life. But it was not the same life; and she wanted to have all their lives about her, enduring, going on, at the same time. She did not yet know that the mother of babies and the mother of boys and girls must die if the mother of men and women is to be born.

      Thoughts came to Frances now that troubled her tranquillity.

      Supposing, after all, the children shouldn't grow up as she wanted them to?

      There was Nicky. She could do nothing with him; she could make no impression on him.

      There was Michael. She couldn't make him out. He loved them, and showed that he loved them; but it was by caresses, by beautiful words, by rare, extravagant acts of renunciation, inconsistent with his self-will; not by anything solid and continuous. There was a softness in Michael that distressed and a hardness that perplexed her. You could make an impression on Michael--far too easily--and the impression stayed. You couldn't obliterate it. Michael's memory was terrible. And he had secret ways. He was growing more and more sensitive, more and more wrapped up in Himself. Supposing Michael became a morbid egoist, like Anthony's brother, Bartholomew?

      And there was Dorothy. She went her own way more than ever, with the absolute conviction that it was the right way. Nothing could turn her. At thirteen her body was no longer obedient. Dorothy was not going to be her mother's companion, or her father's, either; she was Rosalind Jervis's companion. She seemed to care more about little fat, fluffy Rosalind than about any of them except Nicky. Dorothy was interested in Michael; she respected his queer thoughts. It was as if she recognized some power in him that could beat her somewhere some day, and was humble before a thing her cleverness had failed to understand. But it was Nicky that she adored, not Michael; and she was bad for Nicky. She encouraged his naughtiness because it amused her.

      Frances foresaw that a time would come, a little later, when Nicky and Dorothy would be companions, not Nicky and his mother.

      In the evenings, coming home from the golf-links, Frances and Anthony discussed their children.

      Frances said, "You can't make any impression on Nicky. There seems to be no way that you can get at him."

      Anthony thought there was a way. It was a way he had not tried yet, that he did not want to try. But, if he could only bring himself to it, he judged that he could make a distinct impression.

      "What the young rascal wants is a thorough good spanking," said Anthony.

      Nicky said so too.

      The first time he got it Nicky's criticism was that it wasn't a bad idea if his father could have pulled it off all right. But he said, "It's no good if you do it through the cloth. And it's no good unless you want to hurt me, Daddy. And you don't want. And even if you did want, badly enough to try and hurt, supposing you spanked ever so hard, you couldn't hurt as much as my earache. And I can bear that."

      "He's top dog again, you see," said Frances, not without a secret satisfaction.

      "Oh, is he?" said Anthony. "I don't propose to be downed by Nicky."

      Every instinct in him revolted against spanking Nicky. But when Williams, the groom, showed him a graze on each knee of the pony he had bought for Frances and the children, Anthony determined that, this time, Nicky should